04 June 2006

I can't stand them. Usually they're smelly, unkempt, and weak. Several years ago I was talking with a friend during a basketball trip. He was upset because he wasn't getting much time on the floor, basically he felt like he was a benchwarmer. I don't remember how it happened, but somehow during the course of me trying to encourage him I started talking about how everyone played a role in everything and I used the example of Greenpeace.

Since we came from a town on the northern coast of Alaska where the locals still hunted whales, we were both very familiar with the Greenies and I explained how they needed the whalers because if the whalers stopped whaling, the Greenies would have to go find a real job. Also, the whalers needed the Greenies because if they just went off and killed every whale they could they'd eventually run out and couldn't whale any more. Both sides, though directly opposed, helped the other side by doing what they did.

I kept thinking about that, trying to apply it to other scenarios. As I've always been intrigued by all things military I tried to think of how this theory could apply there. Here's what I came up with:

Those that oppose the military (we'll call them Hippies) do so with varying degrees of severity. Most will acknowledge that there is a need for an armed military force, but wish that it was smaller and strictly defensive, while other, more extreme hippies think there should be no organized military at all. Now the question, how do hippies and the military help eachother? First the most obvious answer, the military helps the hippies by making sure that bad guys don't kill them. I think everyone can agree to that. So how do hippies help the military?

Well, most still pay taxes which funds the military, but beyond this, when you see a group of hippies staging a protest against whatever shiny metal object happened to catch their eye that morning you wonder, how does that help the military?

Here's how. Due in large part to the hippies protest against tactics and weapons such as carpet bombing and napalm, American weapons researchers looked for ways to hit targets and not cause as much collateral damage. Now we have things like smart bombs, cruise missiles, and satellite imagery that we can use to locate and destroy bad guys anywhere on the planet. We can hit our target as he's riding in his car on his way to a meeting with another bad guy in Iraq by pushing a button in a control center in the US. Because hippies showed us pictures of the horrors of massive bombing campaigns (necessary as they may have been), the decision makers decided to authorize funding for the research and development (paid for by taxes, thanks again hippies) to make more effective weapons.

So you see, in their own special way, hippies deserve credit for the part they played in the development of the military into the fearsom fighting machine that it is today. Thanks again you smelly, shaggy free spirits. In return for your help destroying the world's bad guys, you get to keep protesting those who pull triggers, push buttons, and make the decision to do so.